"press:here" is sponsored in part by barracuda networks, cloud-connected security and press here sponsored in part by -- barracuda network. storage solutions that simplify i.t. citi national bank, providing loans and lines of credit to help northern california businesses grow. do you know who this man is? dennis fong is like joe namath, if joe namath were in the video game business. is your team more important than your product? mark sigel thinks so. this author shows us how human evolution is speeding up. reporters michelle quinn of the "mercury news" and jacob ward of al-jazeera america this week on >> good morning, everyone.

i'm scott mcgrew. i don't immediately understand every trend in technology, i'm not much of a snapchat user, for instance. but i try to get the gist of every new thing. but this surprised me. this is the inside of the s.a.p. center in san jose during a video game tournament. thousands of people, packed to the rafters, watching other people play video games. now, they do this in person and they watch online. it's a huged by. amazon paid $1 billion for a video game channel called twitch and others have sprung up as well, showing off video. gaes to millions, raptor and some called plays tv has more than 1. 5 million year. that was created by dennis fong, a silicon valley entrepreneur. the most famous video game player of an era. dennis fresh fong is the joe namath of video games.

joined by jake ward, michelle quinn. going back to that video, of all of the people packing the a.s.t. center, if you walked through the s.a.p. center, are you thronged or is it like kids and peewee football and joe namath walked by, who is that old guy. >> it's the latter, the old guy. funniny thing is, fresh was my handle in games. they named the champion after me in the game that they were playing in. >> really? >> at the s.a.p. center. >> ever -- >> most people don't know. majority don't know. which is funny. >> you're in the guinness book of world records, right, as the first great champion of back in the doom and the quake days. you're in the guinness book of world records for a video game. >> right. when i was playing, there was no such thing as professional video gaming. it fell into my lap literally. >> how was that possible?

how could you make a living doing that? >> the "wall street journal" made it possible. they featured -- wrote a story onion line gaming, which was new, and decided to feature me in it, i was the most well-known gamer and ended up with a stencil drawing of mean the day after i was getting calls from. cans saying we'd love to sponsor you. >> you as a kid making $100,000 a year. >> close to $150,000 a year when he was 17. >> and ended up winning a ferrari. >> yes. >> how big this is now, we saw the s.a.p. center. give us a sense for people who are new to this. >> yeah, i mean it's from a viewership perspective as large or bigger than most professional sports. >> nba? >> league of legends is the most popular game in the world, you know. the game has about 70 million monthly active players. unique. and world championships which sold out the staples center in five minutes, held in germany

this past year. >> yeah. >> more people tuned into watch the finals than watched -- >> extreme masters, i believe. >> it's a separate tournament. but just the world finals alone, more people tuned in to watch that than the nba finals or world series. >> i have to assume, tell us about the audience. what is the -- i assume that at some point you age out of professional game, no offense on this, but like -- >> not really. it's not aerobic. >> is the audience sort of i assume typically young, male? >> 13 to 34-year-olds. used to be male dominated but changed a lot, games are more friendly. >> i understand the thrill of playing the game. but watching the game, then i don't understand watching bowling either, so. but kids will attend or watch it on something like twitch or plays tv, which you run. they will watch other people play the game and watch the

screen as it develops. >> yeah. i mean one of the things that's really interesting is, if you draw analogy to professional sports, imagine if lebron james had a gopro camera strapped to his head, a mike in his earpiece, watch everything he was doing from his perspective and ask him questions live and he will answer you in real-time. that's basically twitch. as you said amazon bought for $1 billion. you have equivalents in proga progaming, there could be 60,000 people tuned in at once to watch one guy play for four hours. >> you mentioned sponsors. has any big investors come in to buy east 14. >> yeah, i mean a lot of the pro sports owners are starting to get into the space, mark cuban looking to buying a team. rick fox, used to play on the lakers, now owns a team. from a revenue perspective, it's

obviously dwarfed by professional sports but that's part of why there's so much excitement to it. >> how do you monetize this? how do you -- obviously, i use only this kind of mouse and there's that. but when you broadcast a game, for instance, how do you monetize that? >> well, it's a lot through advertising, right, and sponsor. shs and product placement, like professional sports. >> sure. >> from a revenue perspective, viewership of east sports compared to nfl, is almost equivalent but the revenues are dwarfed. look at e sports $500 million billion, growing to $2 billion next year. nfl's like $22 billion. so there's a lot of room for growth. but you know, people are struggling a little bit to figure out how to reach this audience because 13 to 34 demographic tends to be anti-establishment, anti-corporate. >> right. i would assume there's not a -- as much open cultural

communication between fans. if i'm a real madrid fan or mavericks fan or bump into a guy at the bar with the jersey, we'll recognize each other and there be a connection. is there a tapping out of people's ability to connect with each other culturally over this stuff -- >> you're not in the right demographic. if you go to any junior high, high school, people will be r k rockin' the jerseys, the names. >> there are jerseys. >> absolutely. >> you're taking a lot of the examples from current professional sports and bringing them in to east sports. >> yeah. these guys have millions of fans. they have people just like rock stars, you know, throwing underwear at them when they're on stage and groupies and the whole nine. >> i wanted to ask you about gamer gate. you talked about the demographic of players is really men and women. what do you think the future of

e sports and the struggle going on with gamer gate, do women have a place playing these games? >> they do. in fact, league of legends had its first female starting player in the most recent season. as i said, there's actually the game tends to be more cartoony and there's a lot of different roles you can play. so you know in the past, for a shooter-type of games, it's not that it's anti-female. it's just that females are not generally attracted to that kind of game. >> i saw in that s.a.p. center, women, young women, playing the games, and then in the fan base as well. i think maybe that newest generation will be much better at, you know, these young kids don't think about these things very much. >> i think -- >> i have to let him go because i have to pa a bill. dennis fong, one of -- the greatest video game players of all time. a raptor and plays.tv.

next, venture capitalist doesn't care what you make. he wants to know who's on your team, then you get the money.

dennis: welcome back to "press:here." there may be a few shakeups ahead in tech. welcome back to "press:here." there may be a few shakeups ahead in tack, talk about twitter yahoo! may soon be for sale, bought out by bigger companies which means jack

dorsiand marissa mayer may be moving on. dorsihas a job at square and meyer has enough money to retire several times over. what if they started anew? what sort of teams would they build if they could start fresh. ? mark sigel, managing director the menlo ventures and invested at teams at drop cam, uber, among others. thanks for being with us. you told me that the teams are more important than product. you'll invest in a team based on the team, not the product? >> actually, not entirely true. i think a start-up company is a three-legged stool, you have to have a great mark, product and a great team, if either one of -- either any of those is missing you're not going to have a successful outcome. >> are there specific teams that you and you invest -- when we talk about good teams, we're talking about actual literal specific people. >> yeah. >> not the sense they have a good team. you're looking at their employee

list and going, yes, yes, yes, no, no, no, no. >> we do track specific people. for instance, we know, for instance, when somebody has a company that gets acquired we know when their stock options vest and when they might be spinning out the next company and we track tweem. entrepreneurship is an iterative process. people successful in the past have a better chance of being successful in the future. so we do have specific people in mind. and there's a lot of companies we have to believe in the market and believe they have a great product but back because of the team that's there. >> think about the personality of someone that you would find attractive as a business leader. in today's engineering environment, very often does the skills that are rewarded in the market are not skills that make someone particularly pleasant to spend time with. how do you find people that are both inspiring, good managers, and mechanically sophisticated,

that feels like a complicated cocktail to come up with. >> it is. different personality types do well in different organizations. it's not always a person who is easy to get along with who is the great product manager. steve jobs was not the easiest person to get along with. chemistry has to be right among the team and sometimes great people don't fit into a particular team. we do think a lot about that, inner personal chemistry and dynamics in a company as well. >> if you were jack dorsiof twitter, who lost a lot of people, who kind of team would you try to make for him? your dream team? maybe not names but -- >> no, names. >> well, look, twitter had a lot of turnover and i think the company's struggling to get profitable. they're struggling with product innovation. u think they need -- and jack himself is a great product visionary but i think they need more people cut from the jack dorsey mold, visionaries who can

figure out the next act for twitter. >> if twitter came out with a new product that was popular and interesting and hired somebody you thought was going to help, which was the more important, back to products and people? >> well i think that probably the person, the leader, for that is probably the most important, actually. i think that's going to help attract more people. that's one of the things people don't realize. the talent you track isn't responsible just for their own contribution. it's also that other people want to come work for them. i think making sure that there's center of gravity there of people who are going to attract other great people is really important. actually a company of ours, periscope acquired by twitter and that could be the nexus of a new offering for the company that gets them to the next level. >> what's your view on the whole idea, this notion,zappos a totally flat organizational

structure. i can see if it were that way, but one company that has hierarchical structure, another coming together and it implodes. >> it doesn't work well. when two cultures, acquisitions notorio notoriously, it's not just getting to the transaction, it's making them work afterward and very many of them go wrong for tractly those reasons. i'm not a big fan of the flat structure. it works well when a company's very young and feels like a family. >> three guys in a room. >> but you need to introduce -- i'm not a fan of overly hierarchical structures but you need management, chain of command, if you're going to be an effective organization, too. >> marissa mayer, in terms 0 of what to do next? sell, sell, sell? >> well, i think yahoo!'s clearly challenged and the reason that they are seeing talent leaving the company, i think has a lot to do with how the business is doing. this is a company that obviously

does have some real units making money. >> right. >> i -- i think probably ayahoo! it might be time to sell the company they've got a lot to do rebuilding their team. >> it's harder and harder to hold on to the team. >> absolutely. >> whether talking well they can sense -- lay-offs, that's going drive people away as they worry about that, but down rounds and options under the water, harder to hold people together. can you do that as a leader? >> well, you can. i think, as a public company, you've got to maybe a different talent pool than you look for when you're a start-up. not everybody has the appetite for the long hours, for the risk that you have in a start-up. so i think it can be done. but you know, it does become challenging. as companies decrease in values and employees have options under water turf to retain talent especially in the bay area when top employees have headhunters calling them every day for opportunity. >> is there -- i assume that

there's -- i don't know, i like to think at a certain point you can be a technical person, good to work with, and be willing to stick around even if you don't have stratospheric success at company but the bar is very high. you've got to be going up in order to keep people around? >> there's a lot of people that motivate people, and i think in particular, engineers are motivated by doing a project they feel is important, it's challenging, so it isn't just about the the money. but talented people want to be compensated. and there's so many opportunities for great people that it's just a real challenge of people don't at least see some light at the end of the tunnel to get them to stick around. >> i want to ask you, 30 seconds left, here's my dream team, mak live chin, alech sis ohannian, john collison, and gist jessica >> that's a good dream team.

>> you'll give plea money. >> if you get that team together, i'll write you a check. >> mark sigel, thank you you ever so much for being with us this morning. hacking people, hacking people, scientists and the regular kind and the mat kind try to speed up evolution. i'll try to get it straight when "press:here" continues.

scott: welcome back. i want to show you something, and chances are you've seen it before at the eye doctor, it's called an ishihara plate.

welcome back, i want to show you something. you've seen it before at thee doctor, you likely see the number 74, but there are those of you who don't. for every dozen people watching, one of you can't see that number. statistically, one out of 12 of you are color blind. i bring this up to illustrate a point. we have different senses, some of us see things that others don't, and that affects our perception of reality. did i just show you a number? 11 says yes, 1 says no. changes our senses changes our understanding of the world around us. there are groups, scientists, hackers, some trying to improve human scent, some taste, smell, feel through implants like biohackers are doing or science and genetics. terra has. been looking into this and has a book, we have the technology, how hackies and foodies and scientists are transforming

human perception one sense at a time. i think that's as if nationaling. somebody who can't see the number, i can see the number, science or genetics could build somebody that can see something i don't see? >> possibly. nobody's bill anything quite like that yet. right. we have a same basic human body but we're different, genetically different. some are color-blind, some are deficits or attributes. >> talking about attributes. ooh i can see ultraviolet light. >> not yet. people want to try. but there are animals out there who can, nature has built that gear for other animals. honeybees can see into the ul a ultraviol ultraviolet. pitch viper can sense infrared we can't, right? >> do you find people working on this stuff are trying to compensate for a problem or are they trying to enhance our ability beyond what evolution gave us. >> there's a split actually in the field. it's fair to say two sides of the field are not talking to one another. there's a lot of academics and

people working for for-profit medical companies working on assistive technologies want to help people with a medical problem. and there's an exploratory community of biohackers, gamers, people saying could we do more what nature gave us? they're both doing it. they both have different audiences. >> do you find yourself approving of one or disapproving of another. >> i'm a reporter. i'm not here to tell people who to do with their bodies. i ran around the united states and other countries going anywhere i could get in on a good experiment. i want to see what's going on. i felt like the plague rat moving between different camps, carrying ideas, neuroscientists say this, the biohazards are doing that. >> what's the advantage, if for entertainment examples, an example. >> big things in sensoring have to do with augmented reality, cool applications for games or other portable wearable devices

right. >> what if you could bring in sensory information that people don't already have, one of the companies i met with was talking about night vision, not for gaming but for military purposes. in many cases talking about not wearing something but something that was in your head. the cochlear implants that some deaf people wear, you're increasing something or making it a different thing and it's inside your body? >> yeah. so the medical researchers are doing things inside the body, inside the brain, for the most part. most entertainment developers are working on something wearable. one person told me, who wants to have brain surgery in order to thought control war craft, right? it's too much. >> it's not covered. >> it's not covers. biohack biohackers, people doing explorer to things on their own without the help of medical industry, they are, whoing on putting things in their body. not in their brains. not in their brains. >> an example of something we didn't have a sense and then we

did, that is umami, the taste, in caucasians we had trouble tasting it in a way na asianans did not and all of a sudden it was described and we could taste it. did i get that right? >> this is an interesting idea. technology doesn't just mean lech trokelectronics and wearab means things people made to make our lives better. it's technology is language, we all went to elementary school, there's salty, sweet, bitter. this content existed in japan more than a century but scientists in west saying, no, we don't get it. >> we don't taste it. >> we don't taste it, can't perceive it. around 2,000 people discovered receptors on the tongue. the japanese had a word for this concept, it was recognize is what allowed people to perceive

savoriness. >> isn't that fascinating we didn't have a word, i can't taste. >> some culture has it that we don't have the word for it yet. >> i read a fascinating article, a woman has a book out about emotion and makes that argument for emotion. some call turs have a language for a feeling others don't have. if you don't have it, can you feel it? can you categorize it? now there's a race for a sixth taste, seventh. >> some think we're normal that we never realized we had now. >> until we build it. b one of the things biohackers are trying to give themselves a medical sense. >> this is one they're putting in their hand. >> yeah, it's called the north star. the idea was to build a light-up compass go in the back of your hand and it would light up when facing north. so just this november they came out with eight preliminary version, it doesn't have the

compass element. but the device is called north star. >> down side? risky to put magnets in the body. >> putting anything in the body is risky. i should say, kids, don't do this at home. they're not doing the surgery, the implants themselves, they're having professional body piercers and artists do it. >> that seems fine. >> and i'm sure -- >> showing a bit of the video as you're talking. very careful editing around much of the blood. kara, absolutely and fascinating book which i assume was named after the $6 million man. >> i don't know. i didn't get to name it. journalists never get to write their own headline. >> we have technology, by kara, thank you. we'll be back in a moment.

jacob: i'm going to show you something that i have not looked at yet, ready? unbelievable. i'm going to show you something that i have not looked at yet. ready?

unbelievable. and now, i'm going try to come down. that was a, by far, the scariest thing i've ever done. never felt so insignificant. >> that was a science -- that's jake ward in a tree. how high were you? >> a little over 200 feet. >> now this is for al-jazeera america. i enjoy the quality of that program. i think it does a great job. we love having different reporters on from different places, give different perspective. but al -jazeera is going away. >> english will begin to stream in the united states after we go dark on april 12th. you can enjoy the good bork but al-jazeera america as an entity is going away. >> it's been controversial. i don't think among the smarter viewers but it's something that it's nice to have another voice.

and al-jazeera english will continue. >> the voice of the voices i got to bring that so ticience and technology. we were doing body cameras, trees, great thing. >> thank you. that's our show for this week. i'm scott mcgrew. thank you for making us part of thank you for making us part of your sunday morning. rage sol that simplify it. city national bank, providing loans and lines of credit to help northern california businesses grow.

damian trujillo: hello and welcome to "comunidad del valle." i'm damian trujillo, and today the bay area gardeners scholarship foundation is back, giving more money to bay area students. plus, a personal message to bay area fans by mariachi vargas, on your "comunidad del valle." male announcer: nbc bay area presents "comunidad del valle" with damian trujillo. damian: we begin today with a very unique program called mujeres in accion, down here in the south bay of san jose. with me on "comunidad del valle" are trina trinidad-ramirez over at the oak grove school district and student nayeli zuniga are my guests. welcome to the show. trina trinidad-ramirez: thank you, damian. damian: tell us about the mujeres unidas. what kind of an organization is it and who are you helping? trina: mujeres in accion was organized by just a bunch of women in the community, latina women who wanted to give back to the community.